UPDATE: [20th] DEADLINE EXTENDED: Literature, Art and Culture in an Age of Global Risk

Literature, Art and Culture in an Age of Global Risk: DEADLINE FORABSTRACTS EXTENDED TO MONDAY 9 FEBRUARY 2009

In the wake of the chaos on financial markets triggered by the globalâ€œcredit crunchâ€, and amidst a range of other threats to the stability ofour interconnected and interdependent world, the announcement of thistimely and important conference has excited great interest amongst theinternational academic community. This is a final call for scholars whowish to participate in what will be a landmark event in debates over thecultural implications of globalization.

What are the cultural implications of living under conditions of global,manufactured risk?

In the twentieth century, the possibility arose for the first time that acrisis of planetary proportions might result from human activities. By theearly decades of the century, global economic and financial interdependencewas such that a crisis unfolding in one location could radiate outwards todestabilize the entire socio-economic world-system. Through the twentiethcentury and into the twenty-first, the risk of pandemic upheaval has beenheightened by an array of phenomena: the expansion and acceleration ofmedia and telecommunications networks; the integration of financial marketsand the instantaneous ramification of market fluctuations via programmetrading; nuclear proliferation; international terrorism; rapid populationgrowth; unsustainable consumption of natural resources; overload ofelectricity grids, leading to cascading power failures; pollution of theecosphere and resulting climate change; computer viruses andâ€œcyber-warfareâ€; genetic engineering; cloning; nanotechnology; artificialintelligence; bioweaponry; the emergence and rapid spread of new strains ofinfectious disease; and the development of antibiotic-resistant pathogens.

Scholars speak of â€œsystemic riskâ€ (Anthony Giddens), â€œsimultaneous crisisformationâ€ (David Harvey), a â€œgeneral disasterâ€ (Brian Massumi), â€œworstimaginable accidentsâ€ (Ulrich Beck), â€œtotal risk of catastropheâ€ (FranÃ§oisEwald), â€œglobalâ€ or â€œintegralâ€ accidents (Paul Virilio), â€œglobalcatastrophic risksâ€ (Nick Bostrom and Milan Ä†irkoviÄ‡), and â€œmodernisteventsâ€ â€" â€œevents which not only could not possibly have occurred beforethe twentieth century but the nature, scope, and implications of which noprior age could even have imaginedâ€ (Hayden White).

Such occurrences hover indeterminably somewhere between the possible, theprobable, and the inevitable. This conference will explore how writers,artists, filmmakers, dramatists, philosophers, and critical and culturaltheorists have responded to the prospect and reality of global crisis.Moreover, it will ask how the methodologies of textual and culturalcriticism might offer new insights into our age of global risk.

Topics might include, but are by no means limited to:

-Notions of futurity, messianism, and the Ã venir (â€œto comeâ€)-Modernism and the first era of globalization-Figurations of the contemporary, postmodern, or technological sublime-The twentieth- and twenty-first-century reinvention of apocalyptic andeschatological traditions-The alteration and/or realization of textual meanings in the wake ofcatastrophic events-Connections between conditions of global risk and the aesthetic orintellectual â€œrisksâ€ taken by experimental artists and thinkers-Disaster films-Ecocriticism and climate change-Future ruins-The fate of the archive-â€œNuclear Criticismâ€ and its possible revival post-9/11-(Post-)apocalyptic visions-Cyberculture and utopian/dystopian futures-The cultural implications of Kondratiev waves and world-systems theory

Please send 250-word abstracts for 20-minute papers to the organizer, DrPaul Crosthwaite, at globalrisk_at_cardiff.ac.uk by Monday 9 February 2009.Proposals for three-person panels are also welcome; please send a briefdescription of the panel along with abstracts for the individual papers.